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Canada-Gates partnership to spend $88M from ditched vaccine lab on HIV research

Almost $90 million once earmarked for an HIV vaccine-production facility in Canada will instead be spent on vaccine research and preventing mother-to-child transmission of the virus, Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq announced Tuesday.

A partnership formed in 2005 between the federal government and the Gates Foundation had set aside $88 million for a lab to produce pilot HIV vaccines, but the program was cancelled in February amid much criticism.

Aglukkaq, in Vienna for the International AIDS Conference, said the Canadian HIV Vaccine Initiative has been renewed with the creation of the CHVI Research and Development Alliance.

That alliance will direct the $88 million — $60 million from Canada plus $28 million from the Gates Foundation — to collaborative research aimed at developing candidate HIV vaccines. Of the total, $30 million will go to preventing mother-to-child transmission of the virus in low- and middle-income countries.